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Spirit of little girl asks for her shoes back

After looking at a number of houses in the Grand Haven area in 2004, Michael and his wife fell in love with the one they bought.

Kevin Collier

May 19, 2014

The home was built in the early 1920s and had charm, but it was in need of major renovations.

Michael labored — everything from painting to redoing a bathroom to restoring some wood floors. After almost two months, the family moved in.

“It seemed that every time we would be working on projects, strange things would happen around the house,” Michael said. “Nothing major, just we would hear a noise or think that we would see something here and there. We always joked that something or someone was in the house. It always seemed that our newborn would always see something that was never there.”

To Michael and his wife, it seemed a little girl was with them, watching. And soon, the “little girl” would be missing a pair of shoes, and announce it to them over an unplugged baby monitor in his infant’s room.

After several years, Michael’s stepdaughter was going to be living with him and his wife for the school year.

“We now had two children together since moving here, and the house was only a two bedroom,” Michael said. “We needed more space.”

The new construction project resulted in them building a bedroom in the basement of the home. This involved removing a large “octopus” furnace, which would allow for a newer furnace and water heater — something the family had also wanted.

When contractors started their work, they found a number of things in the venting. Besides discovering a number of small dolls, they discovered a pair of very old black dress shoes.

“We made some jokes about it, and put them up on a shelf without really giving it too much further thought,” Michael recalled.

Within months, the man and his father began to build the new bedroom after the contractors had completed their work. Debris from construction and dry walling began to pile up.

“In the process of cleaning, I grabbed the pair of shoes that were still sitting up on the shelf and threw them into the garbage bag,” Michael said. “I brought all of the stuff out to the curb and called it a night.”

Having a hard time getting to sleep that night, Michael rose at about 3 a.m. and walked downstairs to use his computer. Within minutes, he began hearing something on the baby monitor in the adjacent room. He went into the child’s room to check and found the infant sleeping.

Michael ventured back upstairs to check the receiving end of the monitor in his room to see if everything was functioning.

“The monitor seemed to have more static than usual, so it was hard to make out anything,” he said. “Then, as plain as day, I heard in a little girl’s voice say, ‘I can’t find my shoes.’”

Michael freaked out a bit, but he pondered reasonable explanations.

“Maybe I was picking up something from a neighbor’s house or a cellphone,” he said. “But then the question came up — why would a little girl be looking for her shoes at three in the morning?”

He went outdoors to the curb to recover the old shoes from the garbage bags placed for pickup. It appeared garbage pickers had gone through the trash, for whatever reason, and the shoes were nowhere to be found.

“Nevertheless, the shoes were gone and apparently this little girl was missing them,” Michael said.

When putting up the incoming daughter’s bed the next day, the man noticed the baby monitor had actually been unplugged.

“Being an old house, it was always too hot or too cold in the upstairs bedrooms,” he explained. “I had two fans plugged into the wall where the baby monitor was. The baby monitor had not been plugged in for three or four days since I put the fans in. Now I knew it definitely was not one of my kids that I heard that night.”

Strange as it seemed, a serious attempt was made to remedy the situation. The day after the tiny voice made it clear she was missing her shoes, Michael and his wife replaced the footwear.

“We got (her) a cute little pair of pink, sparkly dress shoes,” he said. “They sit up on top of the water heater to this day.”